


In This Lifetime

by FannyT



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 18:11:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FannyT/pseuds/FannyT
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik gains the power to go back in time. He uses it to try and change his and Charles's fate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Lifetime

THEN—THE GIFT, PART ONE

Mystique was crying quietly, tears rolling down the face of the nurse she'd been using to enter the hospital and find out what had happened to Charles after Cuba. She had just finished relaying the news. Next to her in the sofa, Azazel was looking his usual stoic self, while Janos and Angel perched in one chair each, the latter looking distinctly uncomfortable and staring at the nearest wall, half turned away from Mystique.

 _I should never have gone from that beach_ , Erik thought. _I shouldn't have left him there. If we'd taken him to hospital at once, he wouldn't still be in danger. Maybe they could even have managed to save his legs. If I hadn't left him there._

He didn't say anything out loud, however. Janos had come out of the fight on Cuba with a few cracked ribs of his own, and Erik wasn't too keen to open up that can of worms yet again (since he himself was the reason, and Janos had very clearly never forgotten the fact). 

"This is hard news for those of us who knew Charles," Erik settled for saying at last. "I understand that it doesn't mean much to those of you who joined us recently. But we start our infiltration of the CIA tomorrow, and we should be fresh for that. Let's take this evening off and meet again to go over the plan tomorrow morning."

The others nodded, and both Janos and Angel rose and disappeared so quickly Erik could almost have sworn they had teleported. Mystique, meanwhile, finally seemed to realise that she'd been holding on to the nurse's form all this time, and she dropped it as she dropped the last of her control and put her head in both hands. Erik made to move to her, but before he could decide what to do, Azazel put one hand on her back and she turned her face into his shoulder, sobbing. 

Erik left then. He was vaguely discomfited by the rapport that Azazel and Mystique had developed over the time since they'd all joined forces, but admitted to himself that he could in all honesty not explain why he felt that way. 

He retired to his own room in the base they'd made for themselves and spent the rest of the evening driving coins into the walls, hating Moira MacTaggert and her gun and her metal bullets and himself. When the sky had turned as black as his mood he finally ventured out again, because he was out of whisky and he knew he had an extra bottle in the kitchen somewhere. 

He passed the others' rooms (Angel was crying, but he didn't think it was for Charles especially—Angel cried almost every night, and he thought he should probably look into that soon), and found Azazel already in the kitchen and halfway through his bottle of whisky. 

He didn't feel up to a discussion about other people's property, however, and merely took out a second glass. 

They drank together in silence for a while. 

"Mystique all right?" Erik said finally. 

Azazel shrugged. "She is upset. But is not end of world. Her brother lives."

"It's my fault," Erik said, finally voicing what had been on his mind since Mystique brought them the news. "If I'd only stayed, if I'd done something, anything—I could have helped him."

Azazel shrugged. 

"I just left him there," Erik said. "He will never walk again now, and more than that, I'm worried that there's much worse damage as well. I mean, if he's still in and out of surgery even now, there could be something really wrong. Maybe if they'd had more time at the hospital when it had just happened—" 

Azazel sighed noisily. He said something in Russian, put one hand to his temple and then smashed the other into Erik's chest so hard that he flew out of his chair, the world going black around him before he even hit the floor.

* * *

NOW—THE FIRST CHOICE

 _Erik stands at the beach in Cuba, with the Russian and American fleet behind him and four fellow mutants at his side. They have picked their side, and it's_ his _side. No longer will it be him against the world. He's secured their alliance._

_And most importantly, right now, he's secured the teleport's alliance._

_"Before we do anything else," he says, speaking to his small band but pitching his voice so that the rest can hear him as well, "we need to get our mutant brothers to a hospital. Could you—" He remembers at the last moment and hesitates, looking at Azazel. "I'm sorry, what's your name?" he says. Azazel looks at him blankly, then nods._

_"Azazel," he says. "I take who?"_

_"Take as many as you can handle at once, starting with the most critical," Erik says, pointing. "Charles, Sean and—" He gestures silently at Janos, and Azazel nods again._

_In a flash he's standing next to Charles and MacTaggert, grabbing one shoulder of each. "You come with, to explain," he tells the startled MacTaggert, and then they're gone. In a few seconds he reappears and transports away Sean, then Janos._

_"I take rest now," he says the next time he appears. "Hold hands."_

_Red smoke fills Erik's eyes, and then he's standing in an emergency room, watching nurses and doctors crowd around Charles and the other wounded and thinking that he's done it. He's changed what happened. Things will be different now._

_They aren't._

***** 

"I tried," Charles says. "But I can't do this. I can't handle being your—your _friend_ ," Erik winces, "while you do things like this. Innocents are innocents, Erik, whether they're mutants or humans. You're becoming a _terrorist_ , Erik!"

He's staring up at Erik, because Erik is standing, having been pacing around the room angrily, while Charles is sitting in his wheelchair. 

The hours Erik gained him, by staying and getting them all to hospital instead of running, did nothing for Charles's legs. Still, Erik told himself, at least he stayed. That should count for something. 

But things have been crashing down for weeks now. They have their separate agendas; they decided that as soon as Charles was out of the operating room and conscious again. They each took their stand, there on the beach in Cuba, and their respective allies with them. They've kept in touch, however, by phone and by mind and even sometimes, like today, by meeting in person. They've even spent nights together, clinging to each other with the same desperation as when they first met. 

It's not helping, though. Nothing's helping, and the more they try to keep things alive, the more they die. 

"I can't do this any longer," Charles says quietly, and his hands are tight on the arms of his chair. "I can't oppose everything you do and stand for, and then act as if that doesn't matter when we're together. I can't."

 _We should never have gone our separate ways at all_ , Erik thinks.

* * *

THEN—THE GIFT, PART TWO

"What did you do?" Erik gasped, as he came to with Azazel bending over him and studying his face with a kind of detached curiosity. 

"Here." Azazel reached down one hand to help him up; Erik slapped it away and sat up on his own. 

"What did you do to me?" he demanded again, as a wave of nausea washed over him. "What—"

"I give you new power," Azazel said, leaning back against the wall and watching casually as Erik pushed himself to his feet. 

"You—what? You _mutated_ me?"

Azazel shrugged. "That is your name. Mutations. In my homeworld, we call them gifts. I give you new gift."

"Your _homeworld_?" Erik asked, then realised that he needed to know something else much more urgently. "What gift? What power? _What did you give me_?" 

Azazel stared at him intently. "I give you power to go back, do over." He shrugged again. "You whine endlessly, about the telepath. I give you way to fix problem."

* * *

NOW—THE SECOND CHOICE

_"I feel their guns moving in the water; their metal, targeting us," Erik says loudly. "Go ahead, Charles. Tell me I'm wrong."_

_Charles puts his fingers to his temple—he has to get rid of that tell, they've laughed over this so many times—and Erik sees the moment the realisation dawns on his face._

_"I wanted you to see that," Erik says quietly. Then, with one decisive stroke, he jams every single firing device on the ships lined up against them._

***** 

Erik looks at Charles in despair. _This isn't fair_ , he thinks. _I changed everything this time. We stayed together, fought the same fight._

Charles still ended up in the wheelchair, though. Maybe that's one of the things he can't change, Erik thinks—one of those things that is the world reasserting itself, whatever Erik may do. 

Janos had refused to join them, back on the beach, and when he had made to attack them, MacTaggert had pulled her gun. After that it was the same scene all over again—only this time, Erik was deflecting the bullets away from a fellow mutant, not himself. Janos had run, together with Azazel and Angel, and Erik had gone back with Charles. He stayed, trying to convince himself that Charles now knew that Erik's fight was his fight. Even when Raven left to join Azazel and the others, disappearing in the middle of one night without so much as a note, Erik stayed. 

He's starting to wonder if he isn't deluding himself. 

Because there is something in Charles's eyes sometimes, like now—something wary and watchful. They may still be fighting two different fights. 

And Charles has seen Erik kill. 

That's it, Erik thinks, cold with realisation. He'll have to go back and change course again—the most difficult change yet. He'll have to turn aside from that path he's been following since he was a young boy in a concentration camp, vowing revenge on the man who killed his mother.

But it's _Charles_. He can let go of rage and hatred, if it's all for Charles.

* * *

THEN—THE GIFT, PART THREE

"So how does this work?" Erik asked. 

"You think of thing you do in past that you want to change," Azazel said. "You decide to go back, to do over. You come back to same place. You do over."

"That's sounds simple," Erik said. 

Sarcasm obviously didn't work on Azazel, who just nodded. "Is simple."

"But if I go back now and change what I do," Erik said, spotting the obvious flaw, "what happens to this power? I'll never come to this point then, I'll never have you do whatever you did to me. Won't I lose the power at once when I go back?"

Azazel rolled his eyes. "Gifts that are given are given," he said, as if that explained everything. 

"Oh, of _course_ ," Erik said. 

Sarcasm didn't work that time either.

* * *

NOW—THE THIRD CHOICE

_There's a ringing in Erik's ears. He stares at Shaw, frozen in front of him._

__Erik, please, be the better man _, Charles says in his mind, desperate._ Erik, there will be no turning back if you do this. __

_Erik holds the helmet in both hands. He's been here before—went back to change this exact moment. But it's hard, much harder than he thought it would be._

_He's trembling with rage as he tucks the helmet under one arm._

__You're right _, he says softly in his mind, feeling Charles's relief rush against him._ You're right, Charles. _He looks at Shaw in disgust._ So can you keep him like this until we can get him transported back to the CIA? __

 __I was thinking we could make use of a certain telepath _, Charles tells him._ Erik, I'm so glad. You did the right thing, I promise you. __

_No, the right thing was what he did back in another lifetime._

_He realises suddenly that his free hand is clenched around the coin Shaw gave him, all those years ago. He throws it at Shaw's head, with all the power of his arm and none of his magnetic power. It hits Shaw in the forehead and bounces off harmlessly, rolling away into a corner._

_It was not, Erik reflects as he wraps the still frozen Shaw in metal and starts to levitate him out of the submarine, nearly as satisfying as driving the coin slowly through his head._

***** 

Half a year later, Erik is sitting by Charles's hospital bed, clutching one of Charles's hands tightly and praying to a god he no longer believes in. 

_Hey_ , Charles murmurs softly in his mind, and now his fingers are being squeezed back. _I seem to have something in my mouth._

"Nurse," Erik says, "Nurse! Nurse, he's awake!" And then, _You're intubated, Charles. Just wait, they'll take it away now that you're awake._

 _Nothing can ever really shut me up though, can it?_ Charles says, but the cheerful facade is paper thin. _Erik. I can't feel my legs._

Erik can't put the answer into coherent words. Charles must have read it in his mind anyway. 

_Oh_ , he says. _Oh. I see._

There's a nurse there, then, shooing Erik away as she works with tubes and drips. Erik retires to the chair in the corner, keeping contact with eye and mind. 

_It was Shaw_ , he says, unsure of how much Charles can remember. _When he escaped from the prison, he headed straight for the school. He attacked without warning. You fell—_ He stops, unable to go on. 

_The others?_ Charles asks, and of course he thinks of them first. _Raven?_

 _They're all fine_ , Erik assures him. _Shaw disappeared. Raven—Mystique—she went mad after he attacked you. I've never seen her fight like that before. Even Shaw couldn't handle her and Hank together, so he ran. They're all fine._

He takes a few deep breaths as the nurse finishes up with Charles, remembering the scene he found as he returned to the mansion. He hadn't been there—had only arrived after the fight was done to sirens and flashing blue lights and to a half hysteric Sean barely fit to do any explaining. 

"I can't do this any longer," he blurts out loud as the nurse leaves them again. "I can't see you like—I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything."

Charles frowns, tries to speak and coughs. _What do you mean, Erik?_ he thinks instead. 

"I can't make things right," Erik says. "No matter what I do, it ends up the same. And I can't see you—see your—"

See Charles's disappointment, hurt and anguish when he realises that Erik is not the better man Charles thought him. Because Erik will have to kill Shaw now, and the knowledge that it's in him to do something like that will eat at Charles, destroying everything they have together. Erik can remake his choices, and remake them again, but he will always end up in the same place—with him and Charles standing at opposite ends of a road that's too long for either of them to walk.

"I'm sorry," he says again and stands. He knows where he'll have to go now.

* * *

THEN—THE GIFT, PART FOUR

"Is there any kind of limit on this power?" Erik asked, and when Azazel frowned, elaborated, "Can I go back and change things as many times as I want?"

Azazel shrugged. "If you want."

"Do you have this power?"

"Of course." Azazel sneered. "How else I can give it to you? You cannot give gift you do not have."

"Do you use it?" 

Azazel looked at him blankly for a moment, then looked away. "Not in many years," he said. 

Erik frowned. "Why not?"

Azazel grunted. "I give you power," he said, dismissive. "You choose, use it or no."

There was no way he was getting any more out of Azazel now, Erik realised. 

"All right," he said. "Do you have any final instructions before I go back and change history?"

* * *

NOW—THE LAST CHOICE

_Erik spins through the air and hits the water with a resounding splash. Emma Frost packs a mean punch._

__I have to get her on my side after this _, he thinks as he sinks down the side of Sebastian Shaw's yacht. He seeks out the yacht's anchor with his power and holds on to it, bringing it with him as he kicks back up through the water. He's showing himself to Charles by doing this, he knows that—Charles is somewhere out there, by MacTaggert's side in a government ship—but he hopes that they'll be too distracted by everything else that's going on to care about him. Besides, he has to risk it. He has to get Shaw into his submarine and make him go on the run._

_He feels Charles's probing mind, surprised and delighted, as he wraps the anchor chain around Shaw's yacht. He makes his own mind go blank and dives, swimming away quickly._

_He just sacrificed his opportunity to kill Shaw, but the loss doesn't seem so bitter when he knows that he wouldn't have managed to do it now, anyway. And he knows that Shaw will, in a few weeks, attack the CIA in hopes of capturing the powerful telepath he crossed swords with here tonight._

_Shaw won't find Charles then, because Charles will be in Russia, spying on Emma Frost. But he will find a group of frightened mutant twenty-year-olds, and he will find Erik Lehnsherr._

_And Erik will kill him. He doesn't know how, yet, but he's sure he can find the way. And if he can use the opportunity to gather some of the kids to his side right then and there, so much the better._

_He won't wait for Charles to get back from Russia, though. Because he can't spend this life with Charles—it's too difficult, for both of them. Neither of them can be the person the other wants, and if they compromise their ideals to meet halfway, there won't be anything of them left._

__Goodbye, Charles _, Erik thinks, swimming away towards the shore—all the while wishing he could turn back and all the while knowing he can't._

***** 

Erik walks down the street that will be home from now on, admiring the house fronts and gardens. It's a nice neighbourhood, calm and pleasant. He moved his furniture into his new house here yesterday—a job that took a matter of minutes, with Azazel on the team—and he's been looking forward to taking this walk since he first visited the house for sale. 

He turns onto a side street and then another, and walks slowly, now looking at house numbers. As he comes close to his goal he slows, almost afraid. 

He once promised himself never to do this, but he's tired now—a long life of battle wearing down even his strongest resolve. He's retired, he tells himself, and has been for years. He's done with everything that kept them apart. Why not indulge, why not finally meet, face to face, the man that's been foremost in his mind for the last fifty years. 

He hears the sound of secateurs and stops, then walks slowly forward again. 

Charles is pruning his roses, snipping off drooping flower heads and putting them in a basket on his lap. He's closely focused, peering intently at each cluster of flower heads before deciding which ones have to go. His hands are covered by gardening gloves and his bald head by a hat, and Erik loves him so much he can't speak. He stops where he is, watching Charles work—aware that he must look strange but not willing to do anything about it. 

Finally Charles sees him standing there and raises a hand in greeting. 

"Hello?" he calls, making it a question, and puts the secateurs down on his lap, rolling towards Erik. 

"Hello," Erik says, suddenly awkward. He never thought out what to say, when he finally got here. "Your roses are beautiful," he hazards, clumsily. 

"Thank you," Charles says, with an older variant of the charming smile Erik once knew so well, and gestures to the roses in their basket on his lap. "Deadheading. Endless job," he says, and Erik nods as if he knows what Charles is talking about. 

"I just moved in a couple of streets away," he says, gesturing back the way he came. "Decided to take a stroll and get used to the surroundings."

"Then we're almost neighbours," Charles says. "I'm Charles Xavier, very nice to meet you."

He reaches out to shake Erik's hand, and the movement makes the secateurs slide and fall to the ground. Before he can reach for them, with arm or mind, Erik levitates them back up and places them neatly in Charles's hand. 

They did this together, he knows, him and Charles between them—created a world where this was possible, for a person to show their mutations openly. It wouldn't have been possible for either of them to do it if the other one wasn't there. Charles alone would never have dared come out into the open, and Erik without Charles in the world would have done their cause too much harm for the good to show.

"Oh," Charles says, smiling slightly. "I see." And then, familiar not from this lifetime but from so many others, his voice is in Erik's head: _I, too, am a mutant, and I think my power is rather self-evident. But yours? Telekinesis, perhaps?_

 _Can't you find out?_ Erik asks, falling almost too easily back into teasing, and Charles smiles again. Erik can imagine what it must look like, from the outside—two old men grinning silently at each other, trading looks back and forth. Then again, Charles went public many years ago and is probably well known as a telepath in this neighbourhood. Possibly this is not such an uncommon sight, just here. 

_I try not to_ , Charles says in his head. There's a faint, flickering edge to his voice telling Erik that the same battles Charles fought then, he's also been troubled by in this lifetime. 

_Magnetism_ , Erik says. _That's the short answer. An affinity for all things metal, you could say._

He sees Charles hesitate, feels the shift in emotion through the open link of their minds—the barest hint, but it's enough for one so used to Charles's mind as himself. 

There was a time when that hesitation would have been only instantaneous, with Charles having no qualms about reaching in and plucking the answers he wanted directly from Erik's head. But now Charles only sits, looking at him thoughtfully. Erik has kept his real name hidden all these years, and has never appeared in public without what he thinks of as his uniform. His helmet has hidden his face well enough that he has felt safe in its disguise, and judging by how uncertain Charles is looking, it worked well enough. 

"Yes," he says out loud, because maintaining this conversation by telepathy would feel much too intimate. "No use denying it, I guess. I am Magneto. But the cape and helmet are both laid aside now. Have been for some years. And it's for good."

Charles stares at him for a moment, then runs his hand over his eyes and smiles—albeit shakily. "I suppose there wasn't actually any need for me to introduce myself, then?" he says, and Erik allows himself to laugh, because it's so much _Charles_ that it feels like his heart could burst. 

"No," he says, "but I think you'll find your face is known to more than The Brotherhood, anyway. I promise that I never _intended_ to seek you out, though." That's a lie, of course, but Erik thinks he can be forgiven that one. "I happened to take a house here, and when I realised you were living in the neighbourhood I wanted to pay my respects. I hope I haven't made you uncomfortable."

Charles waves a hand. "No, no, far from it. I was surprised, I must admit, but I've always felt that out of all the adversaries one could have, you're surely not the worst. And definitely not the worst to have as a neighbour." He smiles up at Erik. "If you had turned out to be Mr Sinister in disguise, I might have thought twice about it, however."

Erik laughs again. "That would be somewhat disquieting, I guess."

"Besides," Charles adds, "I do understand where you were coming from. And I can see that you represented, in some ways, a braver course of action than me. Left to my own devices, I may never have gone public as a mutant. It's a question I've debated with Raven many a time."

Erik almost nods, then remembers to frown in confusion. "Raven?" he says. 

"Oh, sorry," Charles says, smiling. "You would know her as Mystique. She's my sister."

"Yes, of course," Erik says. "Raven. I should have remembered."

"No." Charles shakes his head. "I think she would be glad to know you'd forgotten. I've never been able to. She's been a link to you, to your cause—she's been insisting that were always reasons behind what you were doing, and I think that sometimes I could even understand them. Even if, of course, you'd never hear me condoning your actions openly." 

He smiles thoughtfully, and Erik thinks back, like he must be doing, on an adversary that proved less and less adverse as the years went by. Erik wouldn't think of himself as mellowed, but he knows that he's a very different person now from who he was fifty years ago. Back then he could never see himself fighting the same fight as Charles, however much he may love the man, but now he no longer feels their causes to be so very different, after all. 

"There are things we did," he says slowly, "that I would never stand by and let be done today. I believed, when The Brotherhood first began, that I was alone, waving a flag on a barricade for all my kind. Things have changed so much in the last decades, however. And I haven't been spared," he adds, mock rueful.

"For things to change, someone may always have to stand on barricades," Charles says mildly. "That's the case in another fight as well, where I believe we do share some common ground."

Erik almost blushes. It's the most genteel sounding-out he's ever heard, and he can only nod. Charles was one of the first out mutants to also come out as gay, and even if Erik wasn't as brave in that quarter—he feared that a gay terrorist would be laughed at, mocked and subsequently ignored, and told himself that he stayed silent for the sake of his cause—he always made it clear where his sympathies lay. 

He may also have been subtly flirting with Charles whenever opportunity presented itself, for the last fifteen years or so. 

"Things do change," Charles continues. "Too slowly, my young students feel, of course. But even so, I'm amazed at the place we're at today, when I know from where we came." He smiles suddenly, an echo of the wicked grin that could make Erik forget all about war in the matter of seconds, back then a lifetime and a half ago. "But why are we discussing this now—I'm retired, after all, and you've laid aside the mantle. I was just about to have some tea. Do you want to join me and discuss something less political?"

If this is the way it will go, there are worse ways their story could have ended, Erik thinks. And maybe this _is_ where it would have ended, whatever the path up to this point was. Maybe they would always have met in the middle, fifty or sixty years down the line.

This isn't _his_ Charles, he knows that. But it's the Charles he's seen all these years, spouting the same platitudes and naive wishes, tempering over the years to something closer to his own viewpoint (while he has made the same journey from the other direction). It's the Charles that Mystique has told him about; the one who's occasionally been on the other end of a phone line in hostage negotiations; the one who once, during an action in New York ten years ago, took over Janos's body and used him to say "I understand, I do—I would probably do the same if I were where you are, right now." (And then, because it was Charles, added, "But these are still innocents, Magneto!"—as if it wasn't a war they were talking about.)

No, this isn't his Charles, of course. But maybe this is the man he would have grown into. 

_I would love a cup of tea_ , Erik says, sending the thought down the line he can still feel hanging open between them, and Charles grins at him.

* * *

THEN—THE GIFT, PART FIVE

"Only change what _you_ do, what _you_ say," Azazel told him. "You can't tell others, do not do this, do not do that."

"Why?" Erik asked. "What will happen?"

Azazel shrugged. "You can try, tell them. They will not change. They are not part of power. World is like," he waved his hands, trying to illustrate his point, "like elastic string. Snaps back. And some things will always be."

* * *

NOW—AND ALWAYS

"We should have met so much earlier," Charles says, reaching out to take Erik's hand. They are sitting in his garden, in the sun, with the smell of roses all around them. "Think of all the years that were wasted just because we happened to be on opposite sides. What?"

"What?" Erik echoes, caught. 

"You were smiling."

"I'm sure I wasn't."

"I'm sure you were," Charles says. "You were thinking that things certainly wouldn't have turned out this way. That I would have tried to have you incarcerated for being a dastardly if very attractive terrorist, and you would have hated my British face on sight. And my hair. You would have hated my hair."

"I would have loved your hair."

"You would have hated my hair. Everyone hated my hair. I hated my hair, with a passion," Charles says—lying through his teeth, Erik thinks fondly. "But apart from my hair and my face—"

"British face."

"—my British face, thank you, and your war on humankind, I think we could have hit it off. Despite the staggering odds."

Erik smiles, leaning back in his chair with the warm feeling of sun on his face and Charles's hand in his. 

"Maybe you're right," he says.

**Author's Note:**

> This turned out a bit experimental in its form. Hope the changes of tense weren't too distracting!
> 
> Originally I intended to write a harmless fluffy piece about a happily retired Charles trimming his roses. Then Azazel crashed the party with some sort of plot and I went with that instead...


End file.
